Play is a full-stack web framework created to make web application development on the JVM easier and more productive. It provides APIs for Java and Scala.

A full-stack web framework provides solutions for a wide range of time-consuming web development tasks. With Play, developers are focusing on implementing functionality instead of thinking about design and architecture, and re-inventing the wheel. Only a few lines are necessary to write a fully functional web application.

Traditional web frameworks running on the JVM tend to create an abstraction layer over another abstraction layer. These heavy-weight lasagne architectures introduce an additional technical boilerplate and configuration, distracting developers from reaching their goal. Play in turn reduces complexity and simplifies web development by aligning its architecture with the that of the web, instead of abstracting it away.

Users of the Play Framework are web developers. Developers care about code readability and maintainability, fast development cycles, and easy error recovery. Play was designed by web developers to meet these goals.

Play consists of well-known parts. The basic architecture of a Play application follows the model-view-controller pattern, having an HTTP interface at its heart. Cohesive controllers and composable views share the same model.

Code changes are made visible by a simple reload of the web page in the browser. Play takes care of compiling changes in the background, independent of the development environment. This makes the development turnaround fast and easy.

Play also takes care of errors. Developers don't have to read long JVM stack traces to locate an error. Instead, Play shows the significant information directly in the browser, leading the developer right to the origin of the error. It is a big advantage that Play is a JVM framework; almost all parts of a Play application are type-safe.

This is why it is fun to develop Play applications.